"Same old Bill, eh Mable!" eBook

The history of our dialects in the earliest periods
of which we have any record is necessarily somewhat
obscure, owing to the scarcity of the documents that
have come down to us. The earliest of these have
been carefully collected and printed in one volume
by Dr Sweet, entitled The Oldest English Texts,
edited for the Early English Text Society in 1885.
Here we already find the existence of no less than
four dialects, which have been called by the names
of Northumbrian, Mercian, Wessex (or Anglo-Saxon),
and Kentish. These correspond, respectively,
though not quite exactly, to what we may roughly call
Northern, Midland, Southern, and Kentish. Whether
the limits of these dialects were always the same
from the earliest times, we cannot tell; probably
not, when the unsettled state of the country is considered,
in the days when repeated invasions of the Danes and
Norsemen necessitated constant efforts to repel them.
It is therefore sufficient to define the areas covered
by these dialects in quite a rough way. We may
regard the Northumbrian or Northern as the dialect
or group of dialects spoken to the north of the river
Humber, as the name implies; the Wessex or Southern,
as the dialect or group of dialects spoken to the
south of the river Thames; the Kentish as being peculiar
to Kent; and the Mercian as in use in the Midland
districts, chiefly to the south of the Humber and to
the north of the Thames. The modern limits are
somewhat different, but the above division of the
three chief dialects (excluding Kentish) into Northern,
Midland, and Southern is sufficient for taking a broad
general view of the language in the days before the
Norman Conquest.

The investigation of the differences of dialect in
our early documents only dates from 1885, owing to
the previous impossibility of obtaining access to
these oldest texts. Before that date, it so happened
that nearly all the manuscripts that had been printed
or examined were in one and the same dialect, viz.
the Southern (or Wessex). The language employed
in these was (somewhat unhappily) named “Anglo-Saxon”;
and the very natural mistake was made of supposing
that this “Anglo-Saxon” was the sole language
(or dialect) which served for all the “Angles”
and “Saxons” to be found in the “land
of the Angles” or England. This is the
reason why it is desirable to give the more general
name of “Old English” to the oldest forms
of our language, because this term can be employed
collectively, so as to include Northumbrian, Mercian,
“Anglo-Saxon” and Kentish under one designation.
The name “Anglo-Saxon” was certainly rather
inappropriate, as the speakers of it were mostly Saxons
and not Angles at all; which leads up to the paradox
that they did not speak “English”; for
that, in the extreme literal sense, was the language
of the Angles only! But now that the true relationship
of the old dialects is known, it is not uncommon for
scholars to speak of the Wessex dialect as “Saxon,”
and of the Northumbrian and Mercian dialects as “Anglian”;
for the latter are found to have some features in
common that differ sharply from those found in “Saxon.”